A Work-Around For The Facebook Chat Refusing To Stay Closed

Facebook Chat Just Won’t Stay Turned Off

Dear Facebook, please get rid of the bug that enables Facebook Chat to continually turn itself back on even after it’s been turned off repeatedly.

On a very personal note, my mother gets quite aggravated when Chat shows me online, and I “refuse” to reply to her chat message, even though the truth is that I turned chat off and went to bed!

Fortunately, when you go to the gear icon and select to “Turn Off Chat” there is a controls popup box that gives us the clues we need to working around this bug.

From the WEB version of Facebook, on your left hand side bar, scroll down until you find the “Friends” section. If, like me, the scroll bar doesn’t work for the sidebar, you may need to zoom out of the page a bit to get to where you need to be. Alternately, you can click here: https://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/lists

That takes you to a list of your lists!

Now click “+ Create List” to make a new list and name it “All Friends”. Then click the Create button.

Now at the top of the page you will see that it says “All Friends” and right below it it says “Custom List”. Perfect.

Go to the right hand sidebar, where you will who is currently in the list. Below that is a collection of “suggested people” for you to add to the list.

Take advantage of these “Add” buttons and start mass-clicking them. Once you have added all the suggestions, either click the “See More Suggestions” or refresh the page for it to give you more add buttons.

The goal is to (literally) put ALL of your friends (and family) onto a single list that is easy to maintain.

Got them all added to the list and ran out of suggestions? Great!

Now for the next step!

Go back to your chat module. You may have to click on the Facebook link in the upper left to get the the newsfeed so it shows up, but simply get to where you can see that annoying chat again.

Select the “Turn Off Chat” and another dialog box will pop up:

In this box, go under “Turn off chat for only some of my friends…” and then in the text box, slowly type the words All Friends until the drop-down finds the list name and then hit enter. Then click Okay.

Now the Facebook Chat box will remain present but will be EMPTY and you will not be shown as online to people!

There is a related annoyance that will cause Facebook to try to use the Chat Box, even if you have disabled chat, when you click on the “Message” button on someone’s profile.

This can be annoying when you want to write out something more “update” or “email” format than a brief four word chat!

To work around this, go up to the top of your screen, click on the message icon, and in the popup,…. Instead of intuitively selecting “Send New Message”, go to the bottom and FIRST select “SEE ALL”

Once in that panel, then click the “New Message” button in the top right, and you’ll be taken to the “correct” message box to write out the things you need to convey (without getting shoehorned into the Facebook Chat window).

Whew, an awful lot of steps for something that used to be so easy!

There you have it, several ways to work around the new aggravations that have recently arose related to the Facebook Chat and Facebook Messages system on the web version of Facebook!

Comments

Hi Kim, thank you so much for creating all those screenshots and writing the detailed information on how to do this, very helpful. After I had a guy from Africa trying to appeal to my good will to send money for his grandmother I have not only unfriended him but also turned chat off, or on only for my sons. Cheers, Yorinda

Every time I’m on FB I get bothered by those chats! Price to pay of being popular he he.

But seriously, it is so annoying, it makes my skin crawl. And if you don’t answer, people get miffed! I’m strict with my time on FB. Can’t waste it with those who want to sit back and chat or even worse…sell me the best deal in town. Worse than that…the Hi Baby guys who I can be their grandmother! Grrrr

I must say hats off to you for this amazing tip. I have a wide range of network on Facebook, and Facebook Chat module always disturb me. I have tried my best to turn it off, but again and again it automatically makes it way to my dashboard.